Monday 7 August 2006 19.08 EDT
First published on Monday 7 August 2006 19.08 EDT

The American political philosopher and activist Murray Bookchin, who has died of complications of a malfunctioning aortic valve aged 85, was a theorist of the anti-globalisation movement before its time, an ecological visionary, an advocate of direct action and a polemicist. "Capitalism is a social cancer," he argued. "It is the disease of society."

The author of more than 20 books, Bookchin published his article The Problem of Chemicals in Food in 1952, under the pseudonym Lewis Herber. A decade later, again as Herber, he wrote Our Synthetic Environment; he called for a decentralised society, alternative energy and wrote prophetically about pesticides, cancer and obesity. The book preceded Rachel Carson's Silent Spring by nearly six months. His writing in 1964 anticipated the greenhouse effect.

His magnum opus was The Ecology of Freedom (1982). "The domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human," he wrote. "The long-term solution to the ecological crises is a fundamental shift in how we organise society, a new politics based on face-to-face democracy, neighbourhood assemblies and 'the dissolution of hierarchy'."

For Bookchin there was a clear distinction between ecology, which wanted to transform society, and environmentalism, which wants to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalist economy. In Remaking Society (1990) he wrote: "To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing."

Bookchin was born in the Bronx to immigrant parents from southern Russia. His former farmer father Nathan worked as a hatter and his mother was a member of the syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies). As a nine-year-old he joined the communist Young Pioneers, and by 1934 he was in the Young Communist League, which he quit, rejoined - at the time of the Spanish civil war - and then left again. After a high school education, he went to work in a foundry. Later, he was briefly a Trotskyist. After wartime army service guarding the gold in Ford Knox, he worked at General Motors until 1950, during which time he took part in the 1946 GM strike. He then studied electronic engineering at the RCA Institute. His other jobs at this time included a spell as a railwayman.

By the early 1950s Bookchin had moved from Marxism towards a libertarian socialism. He had also been writing for Contemporary Issues magazine, which argued for a completely participatory democracy and identified western capitalism and the Stalinist east as a "business partnership". In that decade too he was a co-founder of the Libertarian League.

By the late 1960s Bookchin, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, was teaching at New York's Free University. In 1969, at a time when Students for a Democratic Society, which had been a key force in the American left in the 1960s, was tearing itself apart via sectarian groups, he published Listen Marxist!, arguing for a "post-scarcity anarchism".

"The problem is not to 'abandon' Marxism, or to 'annul' it," he wrote. "but to transcend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegelian philosophy, Ricardian economics and Blanquist tactics and modes of organisation ... We shall argue that in a more advanced stage of capitalism than Marx dealt with a century ago, and in a more advanced stage of technological development than Marx could have clearly anticipated, a new critique is necessary, which in turn yields new modes of struggle, of organisation, of propaganda and of lifestyle."

Without Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), anarchism would not be the force within the anti-capitalist movement that it is today. Bookchin parted company with anarchism in 1998, refocusing on "communalism", but his writing lifted and sustained the movement from the 19th into the 21st century.

Employed at the Ramapo State College in Mahwah, New Jersey, in 1971 he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology, in Plainfield, Vermont, which won an international reputation for its courses in social theory, eco-philosophy and alternative technologies. He taught there until 2004. In retirement, he settled in Vermont, where in the 1970s he was active in the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear group which pioneered tactics of non-violent direct action.

The list of movements and individuals Bookchin battled against is endless. But to dwell on his quarrels is to paint a picture of him as an enragé. He was more reflective than his public persona suggested and was deeply influenced by Aristotle, Hegel - from whom he developed his idea of dialectical naturalism - Hans Jonas, Lewis Mumford, Theodore Adorno and the anthropologist Paul Radin. He is survived by his partner Janet Biehl, his former wife Bea and his son and daughter.